History rarely advances on the strength of reason alone. More often, it lurches forward under the cover of fear. In such moments, violence is not merely endured; it is repurposed. Catastrophe becomes opportunity. Trauma turns into policy.
In the first quarter of the 21st century, the ‘war on terror’ belonged firmly in this tradition: less a coherent struggle against violence than a political grammar through which power is consolidated, dissent curtailed and deeper structural failures obscured. The pattern is older than the phrase itself. In June 1914, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo was an act of political violence committed by a marginal nationalist cell. Its immediate perpetrators were few; its consequences were planetary. Europe’s great powers seized upon the murder not to isolate the crime, but to unleash dormant rivalries. Diplomatic caution gave way to mobilisation timetables.
Fear of weakness trumped fear of war. Within weeks, the continent was plunged into a catastrophe that would kill millions, dismantle empires, and sow the seeds of fascism. The assassination did not cause the First World War; it licensed it. That logic recurred with chilling efficiency in 1933. The Reichstag fire, whether the work of a lone arsonist or a darker conspiracy, became the pretext for the destruction of German democracy. Emergency decrees suspended civil liberties; communists were arrested en masse; opposition newspapers were silenced. The fire lasted a night.
The fear it produced reshaped a nation for twelve years. Terror was no longer merely an act; it was a tool. Such episodes are not aberrations of European history. They recur wherever institutions are fragile and elites impatient. Pakistan offers its own cautionary tales. The Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case of 1951 was swiftly converted into a foundational myth of internal subversion. The state’s response went far beyond the alleged conspirators. Progressive politics were stigmatised, trade unionism weakened and the space for dissent narrowed. The threat, real or imagined, was magnified to discipline an entire ideological spectrum.
A similar logic governed the aftermath of the assassination of Hayat Mohammad Khan Sherpao in 1975. His murder was a genuine tragedy; its political exploitation was deliberate. The National Awami Party, a mass-based left-leaning organisation with strong support in Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), was banned. Leaders were imprisoned; politics was judicialised; dissent was equated with treason. Violence once again became an alibi – not to address underlying grievances, but to silence those articulating them. These precedents matter because they illuminate how the ‘war on terror’ would later function – not as an emergency, but as a governing framework.
The attacks of September 11, 2001 were horrific crimes. Yet their political afterlife transformed them into something larger: a permanent condition of fear. The language of counterterrorism migrated from policing to geopolitics, from law to ideology. Exceptional measures became routine; surveillance expanded; wars were launched in the name of prevention rather than response. South Asia, and Pakistan in particular, found itself entangled in this narrative with devastating consequences. Declared a ‘frontline state’, Pakistan was absorbed into a global security architecture designed elsewhere and indifferent to local complexity. Militancy was reduced to a single explanatory variable.
Historical legacies – from cold-war proxy wars to regional power struggles – were flattened into a binary of ‘with us or against us’. The result was not security, but permanent instability. Fear proved contagious. Legislatures deferred to security agencies. Courts hesitated. Media outlets learned the rewards of amplification and the costs of scepticism. Entire regions were rendered suspect and entire communities asked to prove their loyalty. The vocabulary of counterterrorism seeped into everyday governance, crowding out debate.
This narrowing of political imagination coincided neatly with another intellectual shift at the close of the 20th century. The end of the cold war produced not humility but hubris. One influential narrative announced the ‘end of history’, proclaiming liberal capitalism the final form of human organisation. Another warned of an inevitable ‘clash of civilisations’, suggesting that culture, not inequality or power, would define future conflict. Both, in different ways, depoliticised economics and moralised geopolitics. Together, they created a world primed for the ‘war on terror’. If history had ended, dissent must be pathological.
If civilisations were destined to clash, violence could be explained without reference to poverty, occupation or humiliation. Terrorism was thus transformed from a tactic into an essence, from a crime into an identity. Entire societies were invited to see themselves either as victims or suspects, rarely as agents. The tragedy is that this narrative flourished precisely when humanity faced problems far more threatening than non-state violence. Economic inequality widened dramatically. Opportunities for social mobility shrank. Education systems hollowed out, producing credentials without competence. Fiscal tightening, imposed through global financial orthodoxy, left poor countries with shrinking policy space. Governance eroded; institutions weakened; courts lost authority.
Inflation gnawed at livelihoods while public services withered. Yet these slow-burn crises lacked the visceral imagery of terror attacks. They did not explode on screens. They did not lend themselves to simple villains. And so they were overshadowed. The media found fear more profitable than nuance. Politicians found security easier to promise than justice. International institutions found conditionality simpler than reform. In Pakistan, the consequences were stark. While resources poured into security, human development stagnated. Schools crumbled; universities struggled; research withered. A generation grew up fluent in the language of threat but ill-equipped for the demands of a global economy.
Lawlessness persisted – not only in the form of militancy, but in everyday injustice: land grabs, contract violations, selective accountability. Terrorism became the explanation for failure, not its symptom. Globally, the pattern repeated. Extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, and targeted killings were normalised. International law yielded to necessity. Sovereignty became conditional; human rights negotiable. The very norms that were supposed to distinguish civilisation from barbarism were suspended in the name of defending civilisation. Fear, once again, had rewritten the rules. None of this is to deny the reality of terrorism or the suffering it causes.
Violence by non-state actors is real and reprehensible. But history warns against allowing such violence to define an era. When fear becomes the organising principle of politics, it crowds out reason. The deeper danger lies in what fear conceals. By focusing relentlessly on terror, societies avert their gaze from structural decline. They stop asking why opportunities are shrinking, why education no longer delivers mobility, why courts inspire little confidence, why inflation erodes dignity, why international rules are applied selectively. Terror becomes the noise that drowns out these uncomfortable questions.
A more honest politics would reverse the lens. Instead of asking how to fight terror endlessly, it would ask why despair finds such fertile ground. Instead of militarising policy, it would democratise opportunity. Instead of invoking civilisation, it would invest in education. Instead of managing fear, it would confront inequality. History suggests that societies rarely choose this path willingly. They are nudged – sometimes forced – towards it by exhaustion, crisis or moral reckoning. We thought Europe learned - after two world wars - that fear is a poor architect of order. But the disintegration wars in Yugoslavia and the post-disintegration wars among the former Soviet states proved otherwise.
Whether South Asia and the wider world can learn without similar devastation remains an open question. What is certain is that terror, like the assassinations and fires before it, has been used less as a warning than as a warrant. And until societies learn to distinguish the crime from the convenience it offers to power, fear will continue to masquerade as policy. For Pakistan, the choice ahead is neither abstract nor ideological but practical. The country can continue to outsource its imagination to the language of fear.
A language that allows terrorism, security exceptionalism and permanent emergency to define budgets, priorities and politics – or it can reclaim the harder work of normal statehood. That would mean treating violence as a problem to be contained by law rather than a lens through which all dissent is viewed; rebuilding courts so justice is credible rather than selective; rescuing education from rote decay and aligning it with opportunity; and shifting public debate from loyalty tests to questions of equity, productivity and governance. It would require resisting the temptation to explain every failure through conspiracy or external threat.
The writer is dean of the faculty of liberal arts at a private university in Karachi. He tweets/posts @NaazirMahmood and can be reached at: [email protected]
